History Memes

I'm happy to hear that you got out of it without losing your family as well. Glad that your family at large is normal. That is usually the way cults achieve compliance, by getting control over entire families and communities.

And you are very much right, that the people in cultus aren't inherently bad people. Most of them, I believe, are generally good human beings, but it is hard to have free will and free thought if the cult you're in owns your family, your friends and everyone you know and love. That is what makes it so toxic, in my opinion. It becomes easier to brainwash people and/or keep them compliant when the threat of losing everything they know is on the line. Better to put up with crazy than to float alone in the void. That is also how victims of abusive relationships keep coming back to their abuser over and over again. I have some experience with that myself.

To me it is not even religion that makes cults scary. Religion is just one tool to groom people into one way of thinking and eventually forcing them to comply and give up control. It can be anything that can turn a group dynamic into a cult. Religion just has a good track record because there is comfort in believing that some higher power is looking out for you as long as you follow an arbitrary set of rules.

And while I can't show you how my country works in a way that will make you understand why I am not worried about American Evangelism-type religions manifesting themselves here, I can assure you that it won't happen. The level of progress that would have to be undone in my country is so much that it is entirely unrealistic. We would have to go back centuries in time to before even America was a known and recoginized country. A decade and a half before America acquired their independence and became a real country, my country took part in the enlightenment trend and used science and an early version of anthropology to do studies in the middle east in order to better understand the bible and the lands the texts came from. The results brought on changes to our perspectives of the world outside our own and it changed how we viewed ourselves and the words written in the bible.

It is centuries upon centuries of waves in terms of science, humanistic values, politics and culture that would have to be undone. We are also very aggressively invested in equality in my country, and the church has had to adapt to that, instead of forcing us to comply. We as a people hold the power and the church, if it wants to survive, has to move with the times to remain remotely relevant.

Christianity is cultural heritage here, but not much more than that. We have a church tax that most of us pay because we are born as members of the church and pay a small percentage of our taxes to the church as a result. You can opt out of the church if you want to and I did that when I was 20. I am no longer a member and I don't pay church tax. More and more people are like me. More and more people don't get married in churches, don't have their children baptized in churches and while the church still has an iron grip on funerals, I believe we will see a change there too, where atheist funerals will become the norm. Confirmations are still popular, but more teenagers reject that as well. I rejected to be confirmated myself, which was not the norm when I was young at all, but nowadays, it is not that weird. The vast majority of teens getting confirmated don't believe in God and don't care about religion. They just want the big party and to fit in with the group. They are, what we call "culture Christians" and that is what most people see themselves as. They go to church during Christmas and not at all the rest of the year. They get married, have baptisms etc. in the church because it is tradition and because it is nice.

However, I don't really know any couples from my generation who were married in a church. I only know one couple who is going to be married in a church and that is because one side of their families want that for traditional reasons. That family would probably be considered secular in America, though. This is also why I believe that the change in funeral traditions will happen gradually as my generation ages and dies out. We are the first ones to fully do away with having the church involved in big life events and I believe that when the time comes, we will do away with funeral traditions too. There may be some counter waves in younger generations to go back to church funerals, but I fully believe it will not remain the norm by then. More like an active choice you make at some point. I dunno where my body will end up, since I donated myself to organ transplants and science. They can put me through a meat grinder and use me as fish food if they want to. I don't care. My boyfriend is actively against being buried in a Christian cemetary, so maybe he'll make plans for that when he's older and the topic becomes more relevant to him.

When it comes to politics, religion is never really present in politics here. I have observed how present religion is in American politics, despite them claiming to have church and state separate. Maybe on paper, but to me, it was always weird that the president must swear on the Bible and the fact that a very large number of American politicians talk about religion while talking about politics. In my country, that never happens and if it did, we would reject the politician and consider them old fashioned and/or mentally ill, lol.

We do have one old political party that is Christian, but they are as irrelevant as they get. The only time I have seen or heard from them the past two decades was like last year when we had municipality elections and one candicate in one municipality inserted his own foot in his mouth and started talking about how gays shouldn't be married in the church. He was promptly shamed by experts who reminded him that such an initiative would be illegal in accordance with out equality laws. I have not heard anything from this Christian party before or since, and we just had a big election this week. They weren't even a thought in anyone's heads. That party will die out with the older generation. People just don't want religion mixed with politics unless it is to handle practical issues like for example to separate funerals from the church, which, again, I think will happen within my lifetime and it will happen organically as my generation ages.

The church tax, btw, is merely paid to upkeep the churches so they look nice and remain symbols of cultural heritage. No church in my country is rolling in money. They have just enough to make the place run. Kinda like a poor man's museum.

I'd like to end my babblings by paraphrasing a metaphor from the 2016 movie, Silence, which is about two Portuguese Christians, who try to keep the Christian faith alive in Japan. I highly recommend the movie for its thought provoking ideas, but this metaphor, I think, explain really well why I am not remotely worried about American Evangelism or similar taking root in my country:

All over the world there are different types of soil and climates. One plant may thrive and multiply in one type of soil, while withering and dying in another. You can try all you might to make your flower grow in this soil, but it will rot and wither here. It has no place in this soil.